Announcing representation of Simeon Barclay

Workplace is delighted to announce representation of Simeon Barclay.

Simeon Barclay draws upon fashion, music, and popular culture to make works that activate complex cultural histories and examine the ways in which we construct and perform identity and self. Combining found and appropriated imagery with text, video, installation and sculpture, Barclay creates reductive, sophisticated works that address aspects of British culture and the intersections of class, race and gender.

Born in 1975 in Huddersfield, UK, Barclay spent 16 years working in the manufacturing industry in the North of England. As a youth he became fascinated with Vogue magazine, a periodical whose glamour and theatricality provided aspirational imagery in stark contrast to his everyday reality working in a factory. This insight would later become the impetus for his involvement in various subcultural movements whose symbolic and alternative modes of expression defined themselves in opposition to social norms.

These formative experiences, coupled with internal conflicts around belonging and his place as a stakeholder in the shaping of British culture and its identity, have contributed to Barclay’s sharp awareness of the socio-cultural, political and economic contexts that inform our lives.
(read more...)

Simeon Barclay will have a solo exhibition at the gallery in 2020
(date to be announced post lockdown)

For further information and available work by Simeon Barclay, please contact
Miles Thurlow: miles@workplacegallery.co.uk

In Focus:

Watch: Simeon Barclay: 'Life Can Be Like a Theatre'
From Vogue-devotee to production engineer to artist, Simeon Barclay focuses on how we shape and define our identity within cultural settings. (click to watch...)
Tateshots, directed by Ellie King

Meeting Simeon Barclay

by Morgan Quaintance

...What has always kept me energised and engaged in contemporary art, are those rare moments when I come across the polar opposite of what some might call 'bullshitters'; rare moments when I come across an artist who is, without effort or affectation, real...Contact with work that has the ability to do this is what keeps me reading, writing and seeking out experiences with, and actually believing in this human construct we call art. Such an encounter took place the first time I met Simeon Barclay. (read more...)

Royal Flush, 2017 ...replays a scene from Alan Bleasdale’s brilliant 1982 television series 'Boys from the Blackstuff' in which Yosser Hughes meets Graeme Souness. A hard-as-nails, no-nonsense Liverpool FC captain, Souness is the idol of the fictional Hughes, who has recently lost his wife, his job, and his sense of identity. (read more...)